Judge Postpones Trader's Trial Until June

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 27, 2003

A federal judge on Friday delayed for a second time the trial of a former energy trader accused of reporting false trades to an industry newsletter.

Todd Geiger, who once worked for Houston-based El Paso Corp., is charged with wire fraud and reporting false trades. His trial, initially set for Feb. 3, had been rescheduled for late March.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas, at a pretrial hearing Friday, pushed back the trial to June 23 and told attorneys to return to her courtroom March 11 to continue pretrial discussions about their subpoena requests.

A federal grand jury indicted Geiger in December, accusing him of reporting 48 fake trades in November 2001. He has pleaded innocent.

Geiger, who was a vice president at El Paso, resigned Nov. 12, 2002, a day before his company disclosed it had found "one incident in which it appears that inaccurate pricing information might have been provided to a trade publication."

The company has since exited the trading business and is cooperating with investigators, who are looking into several energy companies.

Defense attorneys Friday were seeking records of every trade reported to an industry newsletter for more than two years, said Kent Schaffer, who represents McGraw-Hill Cos., parent company of Inside FERC, a publication that uses the information to calculate index prices for the subsequent month. Movement in the index prices often affect the level of profits traders can generate.

Geiger's indictment was the first to emerge from the investigations into energy companies which have announced they have discovered employees who made inaccurate reports to trading publications.

While not part of this case, Houston-based Dynegy Inc., Tulsa, Okla.-based Williams Cos., Dearborn, Mich.-based CMS Energy Corp. and Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. all have disclosed they found false reporting by traders and are under investigation.